Submit a Manuscript

Submit your best research to mSphere® today.

mSphere, ASM's new pan-microbiology, open-access journal, publishes high-impact research across the microbial sciences. The journal welcomes top-tier studies, including papers by scientists who work with microbes but may not consider themselves "microbiologists." mSphere provides rapid, streamlined decisions.

Submit your manuscript via mSphereDirect™ !

Consider submitting your manuscript via mSphereDirect, a new publishing pathway in mSphere that facilitates a fundamental shift from traditional peer review by putting authors in control and allowing them to secure reviews from recognized experts as quickly as possible. This pathway guarantees a decision within five business days. Authors select their own reviewers and submit scientific reviews simultaneously with the original research. mSphere Senior Editors validate the reviewers' credentials and evaluate the quality of the submitted reviews and research. This pathway puts authors in control and allows for rapid decisions, speed to publication, and transparency in review. Find out more about mSphereDirect.

mSphere welcomes the following article types for publication:

Research Articles

Observations

Minireviews

Opinions and Hypotheses

Commentaries

Perspectives

Resource Reports

Editorials

Letters to the Editor

As part of the submission process, authors are encouraged to provide a 150-word "Importance" paragraph, a nontechnical summary written in language that conveys the importance of the work to non-specialists.

ASM primary research journals will consider for publication manuscripts that have been posted in a recognized not-for-profit preprint archive. Please review our preprint policy announcement for more information.

Thoughts from an mSphere author

The mSphere Process

"Having talked with Mike [Imperiale] numerous times since the announcement of mSphere, I knew he wanted to do things differently. One thing they wanted to do differently was to help speed the review process along by considering reviews from previous journals. So, I uploaded the paper to mSphere along with our previous reviews, our response, and the marked up version of the original submission. The paper was handled by Susannah Green Tringe, who secured an additional review that we were able to quickly address and it was accepted on September 22nd. BOOM! How's that for rapid review? Of course I'm biased, but we were very happy with this result."

On Open-Access

"mSphere is clearly an open-access journal. Anyone that wants to go read our paper, was free to do so without paying a dime the day it was posted. I would like to propose that there's more to being open than just publishing in [an] open access journal. Our data are publicly available at NCBI's SRA. The entire analytical history, code, documentation, and a[n] executable version of the manuscript are available through an online repository hosted on GitHub. You should be able to get our data, go to that repository, run our analysis and reproduce the paper. More importantly, you should be able to extend our analysis to address additional questions or use it to improve your analysis."